Sir, - I see from The Irish Times that Dr Cyril Daly believes the majority of Irish doctors favour a free primary health care. The evidence for this is that his motion for such a proposal was actually defeated at the IMO conference! I have to ask: Would he have been so dismissive of the vote had it gone his way? Would it then have been classed as unrepresentative?
There is no such thing as "free health care". There is only a question of who pays. Exchequer funding of universal health care simply diverts money from the poor to the rich, and there are many examples of that in the current system. In a land where the Government refuses to give medical cards to a family of four living on £9,000 a year, is it really social justice to be offering free health to people who can adequately afford to pay for their own?
Kevin Myers's response (April 17th) is spot on. At a recent Irish College of General Practitioners meeting we learned that one performance objective of a practice in Northern Ireland was that all patients who wished access to their GP would be given an appointment within a fortnight! One must ask: "whose agenda is being pursued here anyway?" - Yours, etc.,
Dr Conor O'Toole, Slievemore Clinic, Stillorgan, Co Dublin.